Body Work

by Sara Paretsky

  “Ms. Buckley! I’m V. I. War-”

  “I remember. You’re the detective.”

  She had a lot of practice keeping her face neutral, and her eyes gave nothing away. They were a blue so pale that they seemed transparent in the winter light.

  “I want to talk to you about Nadia. Where can I meet you?”

  “Nowhere. I don’t want to talk to you.”

  She started to get into her car. I moved quickly and braced myself against the open door.

  “You knew her well, I gather, and I need to find out more about her. Did she ever talk to you about Chad Vishneski?”

  “Chad Vishneski? Oh, the crazy vet who shot her. I hardly knew her.”

  She tried to pull the door shut, but I’d wedged myself into the opening.

  “Then why are you here? And why did you kiss her so dramatically?”

  “I came for the same reason you did: to pay my respects to the dead. Perhaps my respects take a more dramatic form than yours.”

  I shook my head. “If you came for the same reason I did, it’s because you have unanswered questions about her murder. It’s not at all clear that Chad was her killer or even that he’s crazy.”

  She turned her head so that her long hair brushed the steering wheel. Her voice, when she again spoke, was barely audible. “I feel responsible for her death, that’s all. Something about the painting she did on my body stirred up Chad, and I came here to ask her forgiveness.”

  She shot me a sidelong glance. “Does that satisfy you?”

  “I almost believed you,” I said, “until you put in the coda. I’m in the phone book when you start feeling like telling me the truth.”

  She flushed and bit her lip, but she wasn’t going to give herself away any further. I slammed her door shut and headed back to the church, but it wasn’t until I reached the big bronze doors that I heard her start her car.

  When I got inside, communion was being distributed. I stood in the rear until the mass ended and the coffin was finally sealed. I moved to the side while the pallbearers carried the coffin down the aisle, the family in its wake. The rest of the mourners straggled to the exits. The subdued chatter, the relief of still being counted among the living, began to grow as the coffin left the building.

  I stood on the steps and watched the undertakers bend over the family. One man helped Cristina Guaman settle Ernest into the backseat; a second gently shepherded the numb and gray Lazar through a door on the other side. Clara, the surviving daughter, was standing by herself, scowling. Despite the cold, she wasn’t wearing a coat over her pink jersey minidress.

  I walked over to her. “I was with your sister when she died. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Under the outrageous makeup, Clara’s eyes were wet, but she held her head defiantly.

  “How come?”

  I was briefly confused.

  “It’s a hard loss-”

  “No, no.” She gave me the look of withering contempt that only adolescents seem able to produce. “How come you were with her?”

  “The woman who came into the funeral to kiss your sister good-bye, her name is Karen Buckley, she performs at Club Gouge. Karen Buckley’s safety had been threatened. I’m a detective. I was trying to see that she didn’t get hurt.”

  “You did a good job, didn’t you? It was my sister who got killed.”

  I smiled painfully but held out my card. “Would you talk to me if I came to your school or your home?”

  Clara’s eyes slid past me to someone behind me. The man in the black cashmere coat appeared next to me.

  “Clara.” He took one of her bare hands between his two gloved ones. “This is no time to be standing around without a coat!”

  She pulled her hand away and gave him the same angry stare she’d turned on me a minute earlier, but didn’t say anything.

  “This is a hard time for your whole family,” the man said. “Your mother needs to be able to count on you. So get into the car before you add to her worries by catching cold, okay?”

  He put a hand on her neck to shepherd her to the car, but she twisted away from him. She climbed into the limo, and the man in black cashmere leaned in over her head to say something to the Guamans. He spoke so softly I couldn’t hear him, but Cristina replied loudly, “I do understand. You don’t need to repeat yourself.”

  He shut the door and slapped the car’s top a couple of times, I guess as a signal to the driver to take off.

  “Clara’s a tough kid to talk to.” He had a light, pleasant baritone.

  “All kids that age are. Or can be.”

  “You a family friend?”

  “I was close to Nadia at one time.” I didn’t feel like explaining my connection as a private investigator. “And you?”

  “I’m sort of an honorary uncle to all of them, especially since poor Ernie had his accident.” He stuck a hand inside his coat and pulled out a card: Rainier Cowles, Attorney.

  “They seem dogged by misfortune; they’re lucky to have an honorary uncle who’s a lawyer.” I didn’t give him a card of my own; a La Salle Street lawyer like him probably wouldn’t take kindly to a PI sniffing around the Guamans. “I don’t know the family well. Can Ernest be left alone?”

  “Not really. It’s not that he’s dangerous, but his impulses are out of whack. Cristina worries about him leaving the stove on, that kind of thing. Lazar’s mother lives with them, helps keep an eye on Ernest.”

  “So how do they manage?”

  I tried to imagine what home life must be like for Clara and her parents: hard work for the parents, but painful for a teenager who had to put her own life on hold.

  “Are you a social worker looking for a customer?” His eyebrows were raised.

  I smiled. “Like you, I was worrying about the Guamans’ welfare, wondering how they cope. And I gather there was another sister who also died-Alexandra.”

  “They don’t like to talk about her.” His voice was bland, but all the muscles in his face tightened.

  “How did she die?”

  One of Ernie’s outbursts came back to me: Allie. Allie is a dove. When Nadia lay in my arms, her last word had been “Allie.” Not bitterness at ending her life in an alley-she thought my face bending over hers was that of her dead sister. My insides twisted in an involuntary spasm of grief.

  “You don’t know?” Cowles said. “It doesn’t sound to me as though you ever knew Nadia at all.”

  “We were close once,” I repeated, “but not for long. She let me know Allie was very important to her, but she didn’t spell out why.”

  His face relaxed again. “I’d let that dead dog lay, then. It’s too painful to Cristina and Lazar-you’ll never hear them talk about Alexandra. By the way, who was the woman who interrupted the service? She knocked poor Father Ogden off balance.”

  I shrugged. “Her name is Karen Buckley.”

  “And what was she to Nadia?”

  I shook my head. “Anybody’s guess.”

  “What’s yours?”

  I smiled again. “Not enough data to begin to guess.”

  “So you’re a careful woman, are you? Not a risk taker, hmm?”

  For some reason, the time I’d swung from a gantry and landed in the Sanitary Canal flashed through my head, and I laughed but didn’t say anything.

  He eyed me narrowly, annoyed at my frivolity but smart enough not to expose himself to possible ridicule. He looked at his watch: the conversation was over. He asked perfunctorily if I was heading to the cemetery, and when I said no, he strode briskly down the street to his car. It was a BMW sedan, which looked a bit like him-expensive cut, shiny black exterior, sleek lines.

  I moved slowly to my Mustang. This was its third winter in Chicago, and it didn’t look sleek at all. It looked like me, tired and even confused, since the front and rear axles seemed to be pointing in opposite directions.

  11 The Mama and the Papa, in Concert

  Back in my office, I found messages from Lotty and Freeman Carter. Lot
ty had called to say that her neurosurgeon, Dr. Rafael, had visited Chad at Cermak Hospital. Rafael had insisted on his removal to Beth Israel. Freeman’s message let me know he’d provided the court order to expedite Chad’s move-he should be at Beth Israel already.

  I called Freeman to thank him, and tried to reach Lotty, both to thank her and to try to get an idea about Chad’s health. Unfortunately, she wasn’t available, and the charge nurse had a scrupulous sense of protocol: I wasn’t part of the family or one of the lawyers; I didn’t get any news. John Vishneski’s phone was turned off; that probably meant he was with his son in the ICU. I asked him to call me and opened the case file I’d started on Chad.

  I added Rainier Cowles’s name to the Vishneski file, but the name sounded so bogus I did a LexisNexis check on him. He was a partner at Palmer & Statten, one of the globe’s megafirms whose Chicago presence occupied eight floors of a Wacker Drive high-rise.

  Cowles had grown up in the northwest suburbs and was respectably educated, with a BA from Michigan and his JD/MBA from Penn. He’d joined Palmer & Statten right after passing the bar, and during the next twenty years had moved steadily up the path to partner. The Palmer & Statten website listed his particular expertise as corporate litigation, with a specialty in multinationals.

  I didn’t find a record of a name change, but it still seemed incredible that parents had burdened their child with such a name. “Prince Rainier,” I murmured to the computer. He’d probably been called that a ton in his subdivision growing up. Maybe it’s why he’d put on the carapace of corporate success. Imposing trial presence, important car. But he must have a soft center, or he wouldn’t be involved with the hard-luck Guamans. Or maybe he’d represented them in litigation over Ernie’s injuries.

  None of this speculation was helping me look at Chad’s relationship with Nadia.

  “The client is the boss. His son is innocent. Get to work proving it,” I said aloud in my sternest voice and phoned Mona Vishneski.

  Mona had left her mother’s as soon as she learned of her son’s arrest, and was now back in Chicago. She was staying with her ex-husband in Wrigleyville, which John hadn’t bothered to tell me. She agreed to meet me for a cup of tea at Lilith’s, a little café on Southport near John’s apartment, around five.

  The snow had started again. Lilith’s was six blocks from my apartment. With the ice and snow packed along the curbs making street parking a challenge, it was better to put my car in my building’s alley garage and walk. I carried my laptop with me in a waterproof case.

  It was already dark by the time I got to the café. The warmth and lights inside seemed feeble against the wind whipping snow pellets against the windows. I ordered a double macchiato and found a table as far from the door as possible.

  While I waited for Mona, I started to download the reports LifeStory and the Monitor Project had given me on Olympia, Karen Buckley, and on Chad himself. I was especially curious about Karen, after her performance at Nadia’s funeral.

  The most important question-who had known whom and how-wasn’t one the computer could answer reliably, although I took a stab at the question through MySpace and Facebook. Olympia had a Facebook page, but you had to have her permission to see any details, such as her cyberfriends. Chad had a MySpace page, but none of the women were among his “friends.” I couldn’t find Karen Buckley on any of the social networks.

  Fishing around to see where Karen’s and Nadia’s lives might have intersected, I checked to see if they had gone to art school together. I already had looked up Nadia’s details-her training at Columbia College in the south Loop, her job at a big design firm, followed by precarious freelancing after she was laid off-but I couldn’t find any information on Karen Buckley. A quick search revealed hundreds of Karen Buckleys-singers, quilters, doctors, lawyers-across the country, but only four dozen Karen Buckleys or K. Buckleys in our four-state area. About six of those seemed to match the Body Artist’s race and age. None of them had a findable history as an artist.

  Unlike most artists, who are at pains to tell you where they’ve trained, where they’ve held shows, what museums own their work, Karen’s history wasn’t just sketchy, it was missing altogether. She didn’t list her education or her shows on the embodiedart.com website. She didn’t offer any personal information at all.

  I needed her Social Security number, but I couldn’t find a home address for her, let alone a credit history that might yield information on her background. I went back to embodiedart.com. If you had to pay her for her work, she must have a bank account or a credit card somewhere, but she took payment only through PayPal, which meant she could be collecting the money under another name, maybe even in another state.

  I sat back in my chair. Here was a woman who was aggressive in exposing herself before audiences and yet she’d left no trail in our hyper-documented age. I could imagine a fear of stalkers might require total anonymity in her life these days, but it was strange that someone so purposefully self-exposing left no public trace of her private life.

  I transferred addresses for the handful of K. Buckleys who might be the Body Artist. I could do old-fashioned legwork, see if any of them had a home studio, but I wasn’t expecting to find her.

  I was so lost in thought, and files, that I didn’t notice Mona Vishneski until she appeared at my table and hesitantly said my name.

  “Ms. Vishneski!” I sprang to my feet.

  She was a lost-looking woman around my age, her clothes hanging on her, as if worry over her son had made her lose a dress size overnight. Close up, I could see how rough her skin was; she didn’t seem to have washed her face or combed her hair since Chad’s arrest. She took off her gloves and then looked at them puzzled, trying to figure out what they were. She was carrying a scuffed leather handbag, big enough to hold a computer and a change of clothes. She finally stuck her gloves into one of its side pockets.

  “John told me he hired you to clear Chad’s name. I used to work with detectives back when I was managing a building for Mercurio. We’d hire them to find out where people had skipped off to without paying their rent, but I don’t remember we ever hired you.”

  I agreed that I’d never worked for Mercurio. Companies that size tend to use big agencies, not solo ops like me.

  “But, Ms. Vishneski, your husband-ex-husband-hired me to find out what happened Friday night at Club Gouge. You both need to understand, however painful it is to think about, that the evidence points to your son having shot Nadia Guaman.”

  “If you think he’s guilty, then I don’t think we should be working with you.” Her eyes were bright with emotion.

  I kept my voice level. “I’m committed to approaching this situation with an open mind. But I can’t ignore evidence, and the evidence is that the murder weapon was found next to Chad. Another thing: I was present myself for two extremely angry encounters between your son and Nadia Guaman. I plan to look into their relationship, to see what lay behind his rage. But if you’d be more comfortable working with one of the detectives you used to know at Mercurio, I can respect that. If Mr. Vishneski agrees, then we’ll void the contract he signed yesterday and return his retainer. I would ask you to pay the fee my lawyer is charging for providing the court order we needed to move Chad from the prison hospital to Beth Israel.”

  Mona Vishneski shifted her weight from foot to foot, uncomfortable at being put on the spot.

  “Do you want to think about it overnight?” I suggested.

  “Oh, I guess we should go ahead, if we’re going to do anything at all.” Her shoulders sagged again as the anger went out of her. “John said you’ve done criminal work and that you come highly recommended. It’s not that I’m not grateful for you getting a real hospital and good doctors for Chad. Just don’t expect me to agree that my son shot a woman, when I know he never could have.”

  Clients who blow hot and cold, they’re always the most annoying to work with. One day they want evidence at any cost, the next, they don’t think you’re up
to the job. Maybe a smart detective would have voided the contract just to keep from being squeezed between a divorced couple. Instead, I bought Mona Vishneski a drink-ginseng peppermint tea-and ordered another macchiato for myself.

  “Tell me about Chad’s guns,” I said when we were finally both sitting. “John says you wouldn’t let him keep them in your apartment, but he did, anyway, didn’t he?”

  For a moment, her anger spurted up again, but then she made a little fluttery gesture like a butterfly settling down. “I didn’t like it, but where else could he keep them? He had two, which I hated, even though everyone in construction carries, even John. But you look at guns and you think of death. I asked Chad how he could stand having a gun anywhere near him after all the death he’d seen in Iraq, and he’d just say, ‘No one’s ever going to sneak up on me again.’ Like the way suicide attackers and them sneak up on our troops in Iraq. Chad lost so many buddies there. It was just a miracle he didn’t get killed himself that time his whole unit died around him.” Like her ex-husband, she pronounced the country I-raq.

  “I used to go to mass every week, thanking God for sparing me what so many other mothers had to bear, their sons dead or missing arms and legs. But watching how Chad’s been since he got home-and now this-maybe I’m not so lucky. Maybe we’d all be better off if he had lost his legs instead of his mind.”

  “Mona!” a voice said. “How can you talk like that?”

  It was John Vishneski. Mona and I had been so intent on each other that we hadn’t noticed him come into the café.

  “John!” Mona cried. “I told you I wanted to see this detective of yours for myself.”

  John gave the smile that seemed to crack his cheeks. I looked away, it was so painful to watch.

  “I got too lonely sitting around the hospital,” he said, “looking at Chad hooked up to all those machines. That Dr. Herschel, she’s something, isn’t she? The way she made those county so-and-sos stand up and salute, it’s the one good thing I’ve seen this week. Mona, you want more tea? Do I order at the counter?”